Nate Silver- Election Expert picks Gators in South

[gatorich]

Originally Posted by allig8ralli

I am hoping that the win or go home mentality will fire them up.

Originally Posted by GatorKWM

That's what Sunday was, and it didn't seem to make any difference. Billy was really fired up on a few timeouts, but the team didn't respond.

Wrong. We lost Sunday and are still playing ball. Lose now and the season is over.

[GatorAvatar]

Originally Posted by orangeblueorangeblue

Sports are far more prone to short-term anomalies than longer-form statistical analysis (baseball tendencies, etc.) or elections.

Hope he's right again, though.

He predicted Seahawks vs Patriots in the Superbowl. Lol.

[GatorPlanet]

This guy picked the presidency correctly. So did I. This guy picks the Gators to advance to the Final 4. So do I. Yet people don't give a rat's ass what I think.

Life ain't fair.

[Matthanuf06]

Originally Posted by GatorPlanet

This guy picked the presidency correctly. So did I. This guy picks the Gators to advance to the Final 4. So do I. Yet people don't give a rat's ass what I think.

Life ain't fair.

Picking the election was mega easy. I'm not an Obama fan but the numbers don't lie. There was only a couple states even debatable. It's like picking the teams in the tournament, all but like 2 are guaranteed.

[TampaGatorFan]

Like I've said many times this season, this Gator team CAN win it all. WILL they win it all? That remains to be seen, but they have the talent, experience, and coaching to win it all.

[fairfaxgator]

Getting by KU...if we get there will be tough...

I have great respect for Bill Self...dude can coach...

[TampaGatorFan]

Originally Posted by fairfaxgator

Getting by KU...if we get there will be tough...

I have great respect for Bill Self...dude can coach...

Yup...we'd have to jump on them early and not give them any hope. They're way too good to mess around with.

[MadduxFanII]

Picking the election was mega easy. I'm not an Obama fan but the numbers don't lie. There was only a couple states even debatable. It's like picking the teams in the tournament, all but like 2 are guaranteed.

But that's sort of the point. The last month of that election was taken up with an argument over whether numbers did lie. Silver was absolutely hammered by a massive collection of pundits who said that, in direct contradiction to all poll results, the race was a dead heat. He was mocked for saying the race wasn't particularly close, that Obama had something like a 90+ percent chance of winning. Hell, the Romney campaign was among those who sincerely believed all the numbers were wrong.

The numbers love us. Absolutely freaking love us. Have all year. Sagarin, Pomeroy, you name it, the advanced statistics think we're as good a bet as anyone to win it all this year. None of the pundits think that. We're actually kind of a punchline with some of these guys: the team that can't win close games.

So this is actually kind of an interesting test.

[msa3]

For what it's worth, Cowherd picked us to the Final Fpur, too. Says we lose to Miami in the semis and Miami wins it all.

[GatorPlanet]

Originally Posted by MadduxFanII

But that's sort of the point. The last month of that election was taken up with an argument over whether numbers did lie. Silver was absolutely hammered by a massive collection of pundits who said that, in direct contradiction to all poll results, the race was a dead heat. He was mocked for saying the race wasn't particularly close, that Obama had something like a 90+ percent chance of winning. Hell, the Romney campaign was among those who sincerely believed all the numbers were wrong.

The numbers love us. Absolutely freaking love us. Have all year. Sagarin, Pomeroy, you name it, the advanced statistics think we're as good a bet as anyone to win it all this year. None of the pundits think that. We're actually kind of a punchline with some of these guys: the team that can't win close games.

So this is actually kind of an interesting test.

I've got the Gators. But the thing is, this team can win it all or they can flame out early. Fortunately, that's what we can say about 8 or 9 teams right now.

Basketball is a lot harder to pick than presidencies. Unless there's a clear favorite, head and shoulders above the field, like the 2012 Wildcats or the 2007 Gators, it's just so hard to get through unscathed.

[RealDeal]

ajc's mark bradley picks minnesota over Fla

"Tubby Smith has taken three schools to the Sweet 16 – Tulsa, Georgia and Kentucky – and he’ll make it a fourth time with Minnesota. The Gophers will take down UCLA, which is missing the injured Jordan Adams, and Florida, which is missing the innate capacity to win a tough game, before losing to Georgetown in the South final."

[whitelakegator]

I will be very happy with a sweet 16. We are a ragtag group of overachievers. Billy D has done a masterful job with these guys. They just don't have the moxie or a goto guy.

I am going to enjoy March Madness this year. I will be cheering loudly for the Gators. If they somehow fail to make the sweet 16 then any criticism that follows will be well deserved. The resident watchdog team will have to deal with it.

[BA69MA72]

Nate Silver is amazing at what he does, but his work is more relevant to longer issues, like a conference regular season. The crazy variables in a single game are actually very hard to predict--but, maybe he's calculated the number of times Casey has the ball in the paint and commits a turnover when Will is in the line-up vs when Patric is vs when Eric is. Otoh, from everything I've read, maybe he has.

To get uber nerdy--read Asimov's Foundation series for a discussion of predicting macro trends vs unexpected single occurrences like genetic mutations

[GatorJeff]

Originally Posted by RealDeal

ajc's mark bradley picks minnesota over Fla

"Tubby Smith has taken three schools to the Sweet 16 – Tulsa, Georgia and Kentucky – and he’ll make it a fourth time with Minnesota. The Gophers will take down UCLA, which is missing the injured Jordan Adams, and Florida, which is missing the innate capacity to win a tough game, before losing to Georgetown in the South final."

They'd face the Hoyas in the Sweet 16, not the regional final. Minnesota and the Gators are in the same half of the region as Georgetown.

[tgatorstew]

Originally Posted by MadduxFanII

But that's sort of the point. The last month of that election was taken up with an argument over whether numbers did lie. Silver was absolutely hammered by a massive collection of pundits who said that, in direct contradiction to all poll results, the race was a dead heat. He was mocked for saying the race wasn't particularly close, that Obama had something like a 90+ percent chance of winning. Hell, the Romney campaign was among those who sincerely believed all the numbers were wrong.

The numbers love us. Absolutely freaking love us. Have all year. Sagarin, Pomeroy, you name it, the advanced statistics think we're as good a bet as anyone to win it all this year. None of the pundits think that. We're actually kind of a punchline with some of these guys: the team that can't win close games.

So this is actually kind of an interesting test.

Very good point. I believe that we will be able to blow out Northwestern State and the winner of UCLA/Minnesota. Georgetown might be a tight game, and we will need someone to step up and make shots. If we can play loose and just play our game then I am relatively sure we will make the Final Four. Louisville is the one team that would probably force us to elevate our game to win.

[bgator85]

Originally Posted by RealDeal

ajc's mark bradley picks minnesota over Fla

"Tubby Smith has taken three schools to the Sweet 16 – Tulsa, Georgia and Kentucky – and he’ll make it a fourth time with Minnesota. The Gophers will take down UCLA, which is missing the injured Jordan Adams, and Florida, which is missing the innate capacity to win a tough game, before losing to Georgetown in the South final."

I don't really understand this love affair with Minnesota. They have lost 11 of their last 16 games. I guess because one of their wins was Indiana that must make them a great team.

[LeafUF]

Originally Posted by msa3

For what it's worth, Cowherd picked us to the Final Fpur, too. Says we lose to Miami in the semis and Miami wins it all.

Thats just ridiculous. There is no way a team with roster that has played in zero tournament games is going to show up and win it all. Think they are having a great run and may make some noise but not gonna win it. And really its about time Miami was good in basketball, it makes sense for them to be a basketball/baseball school.

[jareduf]

Originally Posted by bgator85

I don't really understand this love affair with Minnesota. They have lost 11 of their last 16 games. I guess because one of their wins was Indiana that must make them a great team.

I was thinking the exact same thing. They have lost 3 in a row including at Nebraska...and 7 of their last 10. They have beat Wisconsin and Indiana at home but they are not exactly world beaters. Not saying they couldn't beat us, but this is a game Florida should win.

I am not counting out UCLA either against Minnesota.

[sixoburn]

I think you guys need to differentiate between baseball averages, presidential polling and how we do in the tournament.

In presidential polling (or any polling), there is a true average of how many people want to vote for candidate A versus candidate B. When Nate Silver throws a percentage on this, it is a percentage of how certain he is in the polls. So you have the information to predict an event (polls), which is imperfect, and then the actual event (election) which is more or less "perfect" in most cases. If you run election day 1,000 times Obama would have won 1,000 times because more people wanted to vote for him (this is meant to be a statistical, not a political statement). What Nate Silver did for polling was simply to improve the quality of the "information" gathered from polls.

In his baseball work, he is using past history to determine the "average" of how a person will play better in the future. He would have problems predicting how a person would do in any particular at-bat, game or series, but over enough times there should be a reversion to the mean.

Both kenpom and Nate Silver use formulas to try to improve the quality of the past data (which is similar to what Nate Silver did with polling), which has a lot to do, from what I understand, with tempo adjusted statistics and understanding that scoring margin matters more than wins and losses. However, in any one game there is significant variability. If the kenpom/Nate Silver models are very good (or perfect), then if you ran the NCAA tournament 100,000 times, Florida would win it whatever percentage of the time the model predicts. But in a single tournament, there is significant variability (unlike presidential elections), even if you know the "true quality" of the two teams. I am personally biased in favor of the models, so I think it is great that they think so highly of Florida. It is interesting that vegas seems to agree, to some extent.

[GothamGator]

Silver has a great system, but he would be the first to tell you that all he does is come up with probabilities. Upsets can still happen. We are favored in his system to make the final four, but that's still much less than 50-50 for us.

The one thing that has me concerned about these systems, be it Nate Silver's or Ken Pom's or someone else's, is that they give equal weight to all games during the year. I don't think we are playing nearly as well now as we were in the first 2 months of the year.